Güney27 wrote: ↑Mon Nov 13, 2023 8:35 pm
Ashvin,
I have to disagree with that.
So you're saying that just studying occult science changes thinking (consciousness).
In most cases of people who call themselves anthroposophists I have not observed this.
Furthermore, it is of considerable difficulty to understand what you say in the last post.
Furthermore, your post does not explain how one can check whether esoteric statements, such as that before Earth there was another planetary state in which we breathed fire, are true. This must be believed in confidence until one has acquired the ability to see spiritual events.
I myself am fascinated by Steiner's work, but there is a separation between the phenomenology of thinking, which we can all understand when we observe our thinking, as Cleric shows in his essays, and the claim that we can know that esoteric statements are true without having the ability to see clairvoyantly.
Studying the dynamics of our inner life, i.e. occult science, certainly changes thinking (and feeling/will). I am not sure what you observed. But as mentioned before, it should be a transformative experience. As Steiner said, "For every one step that you take in the pursuit of the hidden knowledge, take three steps in the perfecting of your own character. " We should sense our inner orientation becoming more humble, more patient, more disciplined, more attentive to our experience, more cautious about what qualities we implode into the World-state through our deeds, more interested in what intents, feelings, and impulses animate other souls, and so forth. Spiritual reality is so structured that genuine knowledge of its secrets is inwardly transformative because that reality would not continue to evolve unless humanity also grew into a position of creative
responsibility for the nested layers of its manifestation.
I definitely did not intend to suggest that by ordinary reasoning we will fully understand and verify all claims made by spiritual scientific research. That of course is not the case. But we can discern whether various claims hang together into a coherent whole IF we are also working on perfecting our character as above. It is very often our impatience, our unreasonable expectations, our preferences, etc. that block our holistic reasoning through these unfamiliar topics. These lower impulses all feed into our normal intuitions of 'how the world works' which is actually quite upside down. Once such normal intuition is that the life of soul-spirit arises from physical things and processes. A key part of PoF is reorienting this intuition through the experiential observation of how our spirit fashions the familiar structures and 'laws' of the perceptual spectrum.
Once that is understood, it is only a matter of discerning how the spirit can work at many nested scales - individual, nation, cultural epoch, etc. to planetary incarnation - through all sorts of perceptual structures and mediums according to the adaptive needs of any given ecosystem, i.e. the tasks set for the Earth organism and the various groups and individuals who comprise it. It always helps to remember the individual human organism is a 'little world' of the 'big world'. We are not only a mineral body, but a watery body (90% of our organism is water), airy body, and warmth/fire body (concentrated in the blood but permeates the airy, watery, and mineral bodies as well). Just as our conscious spirit uses its perceptions and concepts as tools to achieve certain tasks related to our personal life of thinking, feeling, and will, the superconscious spirit uses these aspects of our organism to achieve tasks related to the whole stream of human destiny.
It is practically guaranteed from any evolutionary framework that the current organic relations as we find them were not always the same. Even secular science claims that we were once amphibious creatures breathing water, which of course still exist. Scientists have also discovered organisms deep within the Earth's crust that 'breathe' and metabolize chemicals.
https://www.sciencenordic.com/biology-b ... ed/1383847
Living this far away from the sun’s rays means that the bacteria do not undergo photosynthesis, which is the basis for almost all other live on Earth.
Yet the bacteria have managed to find an energy source that enables them to thrive deep inside the earth’s crust.
“The bacteria feed on chemicals that are released when water seeps down through the rocks. The rocks contain iron ions that can react with sea water and produce hydrogen, which the bacteria can use as an energy source for producing their own organic matter,” says Lever.
“This form of chemical synthesis, which is an alternative energy source to photosynthesis, also occurs elsewhere on Earth, for instance around warm springs in the seabed. But this is the first time that it has been found in the earth’s crust below the sea.”
Again, even under a secular scientific understanding, these are images of our own past evolutionary states, although the normal materialistic intuition doesn't allow for these states to be still embedded in our living experience, raised up to soul-spiritual levels of existence. The point is not to reach some kind of bulletproof understanding of these ideas that we can then communicate to others via sensory-intellectual concepts. We actually gain a lot more in our understanding of our normal experience if we start questioning and investigating such expectations and desires because these latter structure our thinking- and feeling-states at the threshold of the spiritual worlds. The most important thing is to realize that, through our thinking, we are
always seeking ideas/principles that allow for a greater harmony of the facts of our experience (outer and inner). This holds no matter if we are doing physical or spiritual science, via ordinary cognition or clairvoyant cognition. We can illustrate this principle as follows.
Imagine you suddenly gained clairvoyance on the spot and were able to meditatively access past stages of the Earth's evolution, and before your spiritual gaze arose images of human-like creatures breathing fire. Would this confirm absolutely that Steiner's claim is true? Not really - it may just be that you got so enamored with Steiner's claims and then hallucinated this imagery in a meditative state. Probably Lorenzo would say that is the case and it is only a 'subjective' experience that can't be replicated by others, and in a sense he is right. Isolated experiences are never how we arrive at a sense of truthfulness. Rather it is whether the content of those experiences and ideas based on them can harmonize many
other facts of our current experience, making them explicable and/or raising them into a higher light of understanding. Some of these other facts may
seem completely unrelated to the idea of 'humans breathing fire on Old Moon', but once we have returned to the living details of our experiential stream equipped with such ideas we gradually begin to see how they cohere that stream into a more meaningful whole than it was before.
And that all comes back to what we mentioned before - only if we are willing to energetically move our thinking in unfamiliar directions, with great interest in both our life of inner and outer experience, can any supersensible facts find their proper place in our intuitive orientation. We have seen plenty of people on this forum who simply aren't willing to do that and therefore remain stuck trying to understand supersensible experience based on normal physical intuition. There can be no question of convincing or helping such people understand what is being spoken of unless they can meet the efforts at least halfway.
